Jennifer Dennard, Billian's HealthDATA, Porter Research, HITR.com
Jennifer Dennard is Social Marketing Director for Atlanta-based Billian's
HealthDATA, Porter Research and HITR.com.
Disruptive Healthcare Innovation Quietly Coming to a Consumer Near You
March 30, 2012
The phrase “disruptive technology” has been on my mind lately. I’ve seen it used online quite often, and heard it more than a few times at HIMSS. US Chief Technology Officer Todd Park echoed the sentiment at the recent Healthcare Experience Design conference, when he talked about the potential innovative technologies have to transform healthcare.
The idea behind it was really brought home to me during Slate technology columnist Farhad Manjoo’s recent keynote at the Georgia Technology Summit. He spent most of his time talking about the top household tech companies – Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon, specifically focusing on how their technologies are now not only taken for granted by most of their consumers, but have created an ecosystem of trickle-down technologies that are slowly beginning to invade other verticals.
Manjoo made the point that these companies were once disruptive innovators – meaning they were small, agile, and smart enough to release products and services that everyone else thought was a little crazy or, at the very least, non-essential, but that have evolved into commodity products and services we can’t live without. He mentioned the advent of the iPod as one example; even the original Kindle could fit into this category. He made everyone laugh when he showed a screenshot of what Amazon.com looked like back in the day. (I think it was from 1994, but don’t hold me to that.) Needless to say, it was primitive.
Of course we all know how the iPod has turned into the iPhone, which has shot off into the direction of a tablet; and how the Kindle has gone 2.0 and turned into the Kindle Fire. His presentation made me wonder, what sort of “crazy” product in healthcare will we all not be able to live without in a few years’ time? What seems completely superfluous, even extravagant, now, that has the potential to be quickly scaled up and adopted by the masses in just a few years time?
I’m leaning towards products like the Fitbit, and other biometric monitoring devices, or perhaps smart phones with these tools built in. I see people with iPods and iPhones strapped to their arms all the time at the gym. What’s to keep them from strapping on a similar device – one that has the potential to better their health? Biz Stone, the founder of Twitter, even mentioned in his HIMSS12 keynote that consumer-facing mobile health products like the Fitbit, or any other device that can monitor a person’s heart rate, blood pressure, weight, calories burned, etc., will soon be very commonplace. I think he said something to the effect that he can easily envision a time when it will be odd for people not to know all of these statistics about themselves at any given moment of the day. I believe a term has been coined for this – the art (or the science) of the quantified self.
BobColiMD say: Efficiently Viewing and Sharing Patient Test Results
One “crazy” healthcare IT product we may not be able to live without in a few years is a vendor-neutral solution to an under appreciated, industry-wide problem in managing the increasing volumes of patient diagnostic test results.
Clinical laboratory, imaging and other test results constitute more than 80 percent of the objective data in an individual’s medical record and are essential for the medical decision making process and critical to improving patient care and reducing costs. As documented by LIS-EHR System integrator Halfpenny Technologies, Inc., “Test results data is essential for patient screening, diagnosis, follow-up, treatment decisions, quality control, as a marker for treatment effectiveness, and as an indicator for individual and population health.” (1)
The big problem still waiting to be solved is that all existing EHR, PHR and HIE platforms still use variable reporting formats to display incomplete and fragmented test results data that are very difficult for physicians to view and share with other physicians and patients. The logical solution is designing and introducing an intuitive, standard format that can report all patient test results as clinically integrated, complete information that can be efficiently read and shared.
A standardized reporting format for all test results is a potential disruptive (breakthrough) healthcare IT innovation that could help facilitate shared medical decision-making for consumers and their physicians. Its clinical functionality and value would be analogous to ONC’s single “Consolidated CDA” standard for clinical content that was designed to enable the electronic exchange and efficient viewing and sharing of patient care summary information during care transitions.(2)
Regardless of the fate of the ACA, as the United States moves into an era of technology-assisted coordinated and accountable care, providing physicians and their patients with a single view for lifetime test results could leverage ONC’s collaborative innovation model (3) to achieve the key goals of creating data liquidity and portability and semantic and workflow interoperability for test results. At the same time, it could improve EHR, PHR and HIE platform usability and help physicians minimize duplicative and redundant testing rates and increase patient safety.
(1)http://wiki.siframework.org/file/view/Connecting+Labs+to+Physicians%27+EHRs+8-19-11.pdf
(2)http://wiki.siframework.org/CDA+Consolidation+Project+Charter ,
(3)http://www.nationalehealth.org/ckfinder/userfiles/files/S&I%20PowerPoint.pdf)